Comcast Outage Hits Parts Of East Coast

A Comcast TV and internet outage hit Boston and parts across the eastern seaboard yesterday, with a fix still pending this Cyber Monday.

The Twitterverse seems to have collectively deduced that it’s a DNS issue and report success in switching to different servers. Google’s at 8.8.4.4. and 8.8.8.8 have been working for some. Here’s info on how to change your DNS settings for both Windows and Mac.

The last message on @ComcastCares, posted yesterday at 9:30 PM, says, “It appears our engineers are finalizing the correction. I appreciate everyone’s patience during this unexpected outage.”

Tipster Hargosh wrote us, “it really helped that their customer service line was either busy or only responding with a recording about “experiencing a major outage in your area.”

Did your Comcast go out yesterday? Have you had any luck in getting it resolved? Sound off in the comments.

yeah, talk about unrealistic expectation of telephony capacity and callcenter reps. even if they staff 100 people in a call center for customer service, if you have an outage of just 10,000 all at once, and a call takes about 4 minutes to get thru introductions and confirm there’s a problem, it will still take almost 7 hours to get thru all the calls. if 100,000 are out…

and thats assuming they stacked enough phone banks to that callcenter.

I got a busy signal the first time I called. The second time I called, they apologized for the wait and said maybe I could find my solution on Comcast.com. If only they proposed a way for me to access the Internet.

My comcast went out last night. And I kept getting DNS errors. Funny enough I was going to call them to see about getting a HDMI box but couldn’t get through since their phone lines were busy. Seems like everyone, their mother, and the dog called.

In Northern Virginia. Last night Comcast internet went out for about 30 minutes. I kept resetting the router to get it to reattach. Later, I got the 75.75.75.75 and 75.75.75.74 DNS IP addresses in there. Then it all went back up and it was fine. I usually don’t ever have a problem with Comcast.

I’m in the Richmond area and we had an issue with our Comcast internet as well. It went down about 8:30pm, and after letting it sit for a few hours I tried to connect and was able to get online.

I did, however, call Comcast several times to report the problem, both at the national number and my local branch. All I got was an automated message that said they were experiencing issues in my area.

Yep. Around 8 pm, I started getting tweets about Comcast being fried. A lot of my friends figured out the DNS thing, but were extremely frustrated at not getting any help from Comcast. Tech support was basically crowdsourced last night, thanks to Comcast’s ineptitude.

I’m right outside of Boston, MA, and I think my internet stopped working around 7:30 or 8.

I’m not extremely tech savvy, but being in my mid-twenties, I’m in the generation of people who are savvy enough to check for the usual suspects with my devices before giving up. So I rebooted my computer, my modem, and my router, with no results. I spoke with a similarly savvy friend using my smartphone, and explained to her that my computer and phone were insisting that I had WiFi. My Macbook Pro showed full bars, and even told me I was connected everywhere I checked. I was unfamiliar with DNS, so I just figured that one of my roommates would knock on my door eventually and we’d troubleshoot together.

But then I started getting tweets on my Droid from a programmer friend, and I noticed the term DNS. So I went and looked it up on my phone, found the info for OpenDNS, and changed my settings. Lo and behold, internet worked.

I noticed that very few sites were reporting on the outage, and that Comcast had no helpful information online. On the few blogs mentioning the outage, many people commented that they had called Comcast hoping for, at the very least, some kind of recorded message acknowledging the problem. I do not think Comcast handled the outage well; while they can’t be expected to have a million customer service reps, they could have had a recorded message explaining the problem and offering Google DNS or OpenDNS info. Maybe they preferred unhappy customers to encouraging the switch in DNS?

I work in tech support, and realized that DNS wasn’t resolving (I’d ping “www.google.com” and I would get no response. Changed my router to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and I was all good, less than an hour after fhe problem.

First they have to see it as an issue. This one is a given. This would be quickly picked up by the NOC (network operations center) and passed on to the Tier 1/2 system administrators. Once contacted the system administrators generally have a reasonable required response time of about 1-2 hours depending on how “mission critical” support is, and who on-call is paying attention, or a myriad of other possibilities.

Once contacted, the system administrators would have to determine 1) What the issue is and 2) attempt to fix it. Depending on *what* was changed it could be a simple fix or a long and complex one.

If it takes any amount of time to fix the issue then everyone gets called because the boss said “get it fixed, now.” I’m sure your thinking “well they should have gotten all hands on deck from the start!!!” and I can understand how that initially makes sense. Let me be clear though, this is *not* what you want.

As soon as the bosses, the bosses bosses, and their bosses are involved, then you get dragged into lengthy email chains that even the most veteran email forwarder wouldn’t touch with a fake alias. And if you are *really* lucky, you are required to join a lengthy conference call where you must spend the next 45 minutes telling the bosses bosses boss the status of “I don’t know what’s wrong yet” because you haven’t actually had time to work on the dire issue at hand.

Did that become a rant? I think it became a rant. Please forgive the rant :)

I know where you’re coming from — I’ve been in those conference rooms (as a senior finance person, not IT), and viewed the mostly useless email exchanges. But I also know that cutting costs is great fun these days

Despite this recent issue, I happen to think that Comcast is a much, much better enterprise than they used to be. At least that’s the case in my area (west of Boston) and I know service probably isn;t the same all over

It was out in CT as well. After about 30 minutes of tinkering with the router and modem, I got on my droid and found the twits people were posting, changed my DNS settings to Google DNS and was back up in no time.

My net went down around 8pm in the Baltimore area and local Comcast phone lines were responding with “all circuits are busy” for that period of time, the 800 number was out to lunch as well, was up shortly after 11pm. Never had a problem with Cable TV that I noticed during that time.

My friend and I had issues (in VT). Thankfully google talk was working, because my Droid X had stopped working 2 days prior and I didn’t know the addresses for OpenDNS or Google’s DNS service, but I was able to get it from him. After that I had no more problems getting online. Happened last night some time after 7 or so.

Mine went out in Boston, called comcast got a busy signal, called again and it kept trying to transfer my call over and over again then it gave up and said “We’re sorry we’re unable to transfer your call, please check comcast.com for more information” Uh thanks….

Was definitley a DNS problem as I could renew my IP address no problem and the modem was online. I switched over to google DNS and things were fine after that.

I just moved and just had my cable installed Tuesday so naturally I assumed it was something wrong on my end. A message on their website noting the outage, or an automated message in the phones system would have saved me about 45 minutes of debugging my router and wireless systems.

In Maryland (south of Baltimore) we had an outage starting around 8. Rebooted modem twice, router once, calls to Comcast either hit busy signal or disconnect. Twitter is how I got reconnected, changing DNS to Google.

We called around 9:30 and they didn’t tell us about this issue. They went through the usual motions, treating us like we had no idea what we were talking about (shut off the modem, leave off for 30 seconds, etc, like we hadn’t tried that already). When we tried to call back, the line was busy over and over. We eventually gave up and tried again at 11:30 or so and it was working.

Leesburg, VA resident here! I was watching Human Centipede lastnight and boom…internet died. Oddly enough, my Ooma VOIP phone worked for about 20 minutes after my Xbox and computers connections were severed. The outage effed up my router some how…to the point that I had to do a factory reset to the damn thing and reconfigure it.

Upper Marlboro, Md – no connection for about an hour – did all the usual disconnect stuff – no go. Called – busy – then “please call back later.” Recording wanted info about what was on screen – nothing, baby. Like how they encourage you to e-mail them when they’re dead in the water. Have no big beef, actually – usually pretty good service. Was Sunday after turkey day – but, then, Sunday before work on Monday – probably should have had the “area wide problem message” up a little sooner. That’s life in the tech age.

Yes, I internet connection went out. So did their customer support hotline. I tried to call multiple times and couldn’t get through all the pre-recorded crap before it would tell me I couldn’t be connected and to try again. I finally gave up and watched a DVD the rest of the night.

I live in Boston, and my Comcast internet went out for a few hours. Their lack of addressing the issue – last night and today – speaks volumes about their lack of interest in being open with customer and consumer issues.

I finally got through to their support phone number after a bunch of tries, waiting through the long moments of silence, random beeps, and pressing “0.” The person I spoke with said that it was a “nationwide outage” and that internet would be back up in the hour. It was finally up about 3 hours after that, and while the outage doesn’t appear to have been nationwide, it was absolutely larger than Comcast’s damage control that it was just the local Boston and local DC area. In fact, internet service outage was rampant along most of the Eastern seaboard.

Ours went out (in New Hampshire) last evening. The boyfriend hopped on his phone and found himself #400-and-something in line for a live chat person at Comcast. Concluded that it must be some sort of outage, did a quick search (also via phone) and discovered the DNS-how-to. We were back online in no time.

It’s annoying, and without the boyfriend’s level of dedication/know-how to getting us back to the interwebs ASAP, I would probably have sat around mumbling “stupid Comcast” until it came back on its own.

Side note – I never, ever thought I’d say anything nice about the cable company that billed me twice four months in a row, but we did wait to see how long it would take to get through 400ish people in the live chat help line. It only took about 15 minutes – I guess that’s sort of impressive.

Lost it in my area of Vermonth (south of Rutland) around 7:30 or 8:00. Tried calling a couple of times only to get busy signals. Once I started hearing grumbles from friends that are scattered around, I realized why the line was busy. I gave up and read a book for the night.

And this is why I go with Google & openDNS for my DNS servers. I’m not on Comcast, but my previous cable company had DNS outages a LOT. I’m on AT&T now, and I still use 3rd party DNS, which is actually faster than AT&T’s (for me) and a heck of a lot more reliable.

Same here in MD. I rebooted my laptop, router and cable modem. Called them and got a busy signal and all circuits are busy. I turned off wifi on my iphone and googles comcast. The first hit was a stream of twitter complaints. So I knew there was not much I could do but wait for them to fix it or use 8.8.8.8

the last time I used Comcast’s DNS was about 10 years ago, right when I got the service. even back then, it was slow. I changed it to mu university’s DNS servers and boom, nice and snappy. Ever since I left college, I’ve used MIT’s and recently switched to Google DNS.

They’ve had a long time to fix their DNS and apparently haven’t. I guess I’m not really surprised.

Didn’t come back until about 6 pm Monday here in Groveland, northeastern MA close to NH and Maine. NECN, owned by Comcast, was chirping cheerily that all service had come back at midnight, Sunday – hah.

I too was hit by this yesterday morning. I got up around 2am to find my comcast internet was down. Went to work, and when I came home for lunch at 7:30am and it was still down, called Comcast and was told it was part of the previous day’s outage.

Comcast went out on October 28th at 8 pm in my area (live in Baltimore) as well, dialed 1-800-Comcast on my cellphone, rang busy the first three times, finally got through, automated voice asked me for my 10 digit number where I have service, entered my 10 digit home phone # then pressed 1 for a service outage then pressed 2 for the option of high speed internet and got the typical automated message saying that my area was experiencing an outage and that their “technicians” were working on it and that I did NOT need to wait on the line for a person then something new to me was said, the automated voice then gave me the option for an automated call back once service is restored and if I wanted that to press 1, or press 2 for a person but I wanted to speak to a person to at least get an estimated time on when the internet would return because I was working on something important at the time the net went out so I pressed 2 and I wish I recorded the automated messages that followed, the first said that due to the high call volume due to the service outage in my area the wait time would be higher than usual so I thought “That’s ok, I’ll stay on the line and wait.” then a second message came on and this is completely new to me and this hasn’t happened to me with other customer service numbers I’ve called before and this is why I wished I recorded the call. The second message said that due to the high call volume, Comcast was unable to keep me on the line then the voice said “Goodbye” and I was promptly disconnected, I redialed and got an immediate busy tone and kept getting a busy tone and thought “WTF?!?!? What kind of customer service is this Comcast… Disconnecting a customer because of high call volume… You’re extremely lucky that you are the ONLY company that offers high speed internet AND cable TV in Baltimore city…”